Interesting news that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has bought privately held Business Wire. There is more here than meets the eye, because Business Wire is poised to become much more than a distribution hub for press releases. Competitor PR Newswire, no doubt, will be on a similar march.

As I recently chatted about with Media Survey's Sam Whitmore, the combination of what Business Wire has traditionally done -- now combined with RSS and such direct informational rich media avenues as B2B podcasts -- offers businesses powerful new ways to spur viral online attraction to their brands, products, and value.

Whereas Business Wire traditionally delivered text-based distribution of marketing communications and required public distribution of various informational materials, it is now poised to be a hub for rich media business communications. In other words, syndicated multimedia business knowledge distribution.

In a sense, ironically, the popularity of blogging, tagged search, and the blurring of the lines between information, opinion, and journalism, allows for Business Wire and its ilk to vastly expand their purview. A disintermediated mainstream media greases the skids not only for grassroots journalism, but grassroots B2B communications as well.

In other words, what has worked so well -- viral adoption via online discussion and burgeoning linked communities of affinity -- for open source software, blogs, and now podcasts, can be well extended across any and all business and consumer communications. Business Wire, as a well-backed wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, will work to show them how. The cost of creating and distributing such content has plummeted.

This amounts to just the kind of business Mr. Buffett likes: steady stream of recurring revenues, new growth and productivity from technological innovation, few competitors, and a strong global brand.

Incidentally, I had the pleasure last summer of moderating a well-attended panel discussion of how blogging is affecting the business of business communications. The event, in Waltham, Mass., was organized and hosted by the Boston office of Business Wire.

Business Wire at the time was explaining and evangelizing to its clients how RSS feeds and online syndication in general offered a bright new way for companies and PR agencies to reach out to and better define their core constituencies and end-user business ecologies. Business Wire smartly and correctly identified RSS as not a threat, but as a great new opportunity.

So, take it from the Sage of Omaha, now is the time for businesses to begin injecting more than press releases into the powerful distribution networks, such as Business Wire, to directly reach their customers and prospects. Start the discussion directly with those most interested, those who search and syndicate.

I also think some high-quality, low-cost, knowledge-based informational B2B podcasts about new products and technologies -- the equivalent of a deep-dive briefing but open to all interested listeners -- make an excellent addition to press releases when it comes to getting the word out on business news.

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research, and consulting firm. Gardner, a leading identifier of software and cloud productivity trends and new IT business growth opportunities, honed his skills and refined his insights as an industry analyst, pundit, and news edito...
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Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, LLC, a New Hampshire-based IT analysis and new media content production and consultancy firm that he founded in 2005. He produces a series of podcast/videocast/transcript/blog content shows, called BriefingsDirect[tm/sm], some of which are sponsored and which he blogs on. Such sponsored shows are declared individually as such and by what organization or company. When Dana blogs on ZDNet on companies that he does have, or has had, consulting and/or sponsorship relationships, he declares that in each blog entry. There is no connection between the negotiation of such sponsorships and the opinions expressed by Dana here on ZDNet. The following organizations/companies are active sponsors, or have consulting relationships with Dana: Ariba/SAP, Akamai Technologies, BMC Software, Dell Software, Embarcadero Technologies, GigaOM Research, Hewlett-Packard, Kapow Software, The Open Group, VMware, and Workday. As a matter of CNET Networks and Interarbor Solutions policies, when Dana covers an organization that is also a sponsor of a BriefingsDirect-produced podcast, videocast or any other content, a disclosure will be included with the coverage. Updated (4/11/2013): Instead of providing a disclosure on just those editorials (blog posts, etc.) that intersect the above listed companies, we have changed the policy to include a link to this full disclosure at the end of every one of Dana's blog posts. In the case of audio or video-based coverage, such disclosures will be provided within the editorial content itself.